BOLD VISIONARY
FREE SPIRIT WORDS LINDA READ PHOTOS LISA PEARL
WHEN FORMER PRIMARY school teacher and Sunshine Coast resident Nicky Mih read a book 12 years ago about the sex trafficking industry in Cambodia, it set her life on a course she could never have imagined. Today, as the founder of not-for-profit child protection organisation Free To Shine, Nicky leads a team of 18 education officers and social workers to prevent the trafficking of vulnerable girls by getting them into school. She is also in high demand in the business community as a public speaker, and has written her own book – Do What Matters – about the lessons of life and leadership she has learnt during her extraordinary career. To date, Nicky’s mission with Free To Shine has resulted in securing the safety and education of 754 girls from 59 rural villages in Cambodia. But she has no intention of stopping there. The book that started it all was The Road of Lost Innocence by Somaly Mam, a teenage girl in Cambodia who was sold to a brothel. It was a turning point for Nicky, who says she had always felt compelled to help vulnerable women but hadn’t known how. “I had read a whole bunch of books about the plight of women and girls in different countries around the world,” says Nicky, who is originally from England. 38
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“Stories from women who were gang-raped for punishment for a crime [they had not] committed but for a crime that a family member had allegedly committed; to a 10-year-old who walks into a courtroom and asks them that they help her get divorced, for example. “I was so upset these things were happening; I hated that those things happened and I wanted to help but I didn’t know how. So, every time I’d read a book I’d put it on my bookcase and then I’d just go about my life as usual. It was just niggling under the surface and really bugging me and I thought ‘I can’t keep reading these books and not doing anything about it’. “So I made a quiet little promise some time, when I was hanging the washing out, that the next book I read, no matter what the issue, what the country, I was going to do something. A few months later I found that the next book I was reading was a book about sex trafficking in Cambodia and I remembered that promise. “I knew it was time for me to step up.” What followed was a one-month stint as a volunteer with an organisation in Cambodia that helped survivors of trafficking. At the end of that month, Nicky asked the organisation how she could help if she got a group of people together back on the Sunshine Coast. “It was only then I learnt that the day those girls got
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